Thomas Sutcliffe: How to whip the Lords into shape

As the House of Lords takes up the subject of its own reform today, following the House of Commons' vote last week for an entirely elected chamber, I'd like to offer a modest proposal to improve its future standing in the country at large - and possibly also work a way around the tricky constitutional problem of competing mandates.

This is that whips should be banned from any reformed upper house. I don't mean by this cat-o-nine-tails, riding crops or drovers bullwhips. Legislation can be a tiring and tedious business and their lordships (or whatever they are called when the reforms are finally implemented some time in the next century) are surely entitled to whatever forms of invigoration will get them through the day.

What I have in mind are party whips - applying the lash to make sure that not too many rogue steers cut away from the herd during the cattle-drive of a legislative programme. More than that, not only should whips be banned from an upper house, but all other traces of the parties they serve as well. Established political groupings would be prohibited from funding the election campaign of any prospective peer, and allegiances or connections to those parties would be disallowed from election literature.

At the same time, the daily workings of the upper chamber would be altered so as to remove the apparatus of oppositional politics - with its inherent implication that on any given issue there are only two substantive positions (or two and a half, if you include the Lib-Dems).

Of course, these rules would be dodged and manipulated just as energetically as those that already exist to prevent the sales of honours. And in many cases, it would be virtually impossible to obscure the party allegiances of those standing, since a disproportionate number of election candidates are likely to be drawn from a pool of former Commons' members unable to kick the drug of parliamentary politics.

But the mere existence of the rules should help to make it clear that the Lords (or the Senate, or whatever) was not simply an alternative arena for the exercise of party politics - an activity that, unfairly or not, is the subject of considerable public disenchantment. Members of the upper house would owe their allegiance not to a set of manifesto pledges (so often superseded by events or experience) or to a party platform, but to a notion of effective and efficient legislation.

This alteration to parliamentary practice would, as it happens, go with the grain of their Lordships' vanity. Those already in place like to think of themselves not as lobby fodder, available for the bidding of party managers, but as a senatorial elite, sufficiently liberated from party discipline to offer restraining wisdom - even moral guidance - to the government of the day.

And, as anyone who has sat through Commons and Lords debate in rapid succession will know, that isn't entirely an empty vanity either. In the Commons, standing apart from party interest is an occasional luxury of conscience, as Nigel Griffiths has demonstrated over Trident.

In any elected upper house it should be taken for granted as a basic working principle, and candidates for election would stand on their capacities and experience, not their team loyalty. It might even help with that public disenchantment, which I suspect has a lot less to do with politics than with parties that make it so predictable.

Sex, lice and reels of videotape

The New Scientist reports that a study of pubic lice suggests that these parasites were transferred between early humans and gorillas about 3.3 million years ago, a story which delights me largely because I can picture the facial expression of biblical fundamentalists as they absorb the news.

Apparently, the rate of gene mutation between gorilla crabs and human crabs didn't match with the date of the last common ancestor between us. Sadly, the scientists claim this is not the result of hominid-gorilla philandering, but more likely the result of early humans bedding down in abandoned gorilla nests. It makes you wonder whether there's something Sir David Attenborough hasn't told us about his love-in with a group of mountain gorillas.

* Walking through Finsbury Park yesterday in the sunshine it was impossible to miss the evidence that spring had arrived early. In the grass the bright carmine of discarded ketchup sachets and Coke cans. Here, sprouting vibrantly among the still-dormant bedding plants, the fresh colours of the Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes and Monster Munch bags. And everywhere you looked there was the ice blue of discarded plastic bottles. I even encountered the vibrant crocus yellow of a debt-restructuring leaflet - a species you're unlikely to find in London's more monied open spaces.

This change to the landscape has been sudden - the largely monotone green and brown which prevail throughout winter banished by one warm weekend. And while the gardeners do their best to keep it all in check, they can't work miracles. Sadly, unless the weather changes, the park will be a riot of colour until the first rains of autumn drive the great British public indoors again.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk

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